Canada: One Loser, No Winners

So Nanos has some new numbers out.

Nothing spectacular about them - just corroboration of EKOS, both of whom see, surprisingly, a Conservative rise this week. But apart from the current numbers, what caught my eye was a chart tracking voting intentions all the way back to 2002. I'm not happy to cut-and-paste from another site, but the graph that I'm including here, for reference, comes directly from the link at the top of the page.

Interesting it certainly is. Looking across the chart from 2002 to present, the main thing you note is the terrible dive Liberal numbers have taken: from 49.0% to 32.9%, meaning fully one in three 2002 Liberals can now be found elsewhere.

But where exactly? While each of the other four parties has shown an increase in the interim, the increases are all mild: to the Liberals' -16.1% drop, we see relatively paltry gains of 1.6% for the Conservatives, 3.8% for the BQ, 6.3% for the NDP and 4.9% for the Greens, since they weren't even on the survey in 2002.

There are a few huge caveats to observe here: first, it's remarkable that in 2002, 35.0% of the country was willing to vote for a party that wouldn't exist for another year and a half. I have to presume that 35.0% was the combined total of the PC and CA numbers, rather dodgy science to be sure. And even if this is true, conventional wisdom has it that the redder Tories reacted badly to the merger, drifting to the Liberals or elsewhere. And yet the first major thing we see happening after December 2003 is not a drop in the blue line but a huge drop in the red line. What's that all about?

After all, after that drop, the Liberals are sitting at 37.0% - it had already shed 12.0 of the 16.1% it was due to drop, and the remainder is not all that significant, statistically. You might call it stasis since then.

If it is stasis, though, it's highly unstable. Based on unreality as those numbers may be, the left side of the graph shows a political scene Canadians are well familiar with - two clearly dominant parties with not-insignificant additional parties laying well below the others. Somewhere between bipartisan and multipartisan. That's still true when you look on the right side of the graph, perhaps, but it's much muddier. For a while now, the combined totals of the NDP, the BQ and the Green Party have surpassed or at least drawn even with the two 'ruling' parties. Not that that means anything except as an intriguing reading of the statistics, but parties are hardly 'fringe' when in combination the rival the 'majors'.

We've been here before. The merger of the PC and CA parties really was a game-changer, but it only brought back the appearance of a renewed bipartisanism. The 1990s were a strange time for Canadian politics. Chrétien's Liberals were able to get back-to-back majorities with as low as 38.46% of the vote. That bears consideration: Chrétien was able to secure a majority with just a percentage point or two more than Harper's Conservatives are currently polling.

The cure in 2003 was to 'unite the right'. The death of bipartisanism was dealt with by attempting to revive it. I'm sceptical of equivalent 'unite the left' talk at the moment, because the perception of unity the Liberals, the NDP, the BQ and the Greens appear to have (all parties are happy to admit that at the moment 'us vs. them' means Conservatives vs. everyone else) is little more than skin-deep. I think we need to have a discusison in Canada about the permanent death of bipartisanism, and how to overcome adversarial politics in a landscape where it's no longer feasable.

32.4% is an atrocious number for the party that has spent the majority of Canada's time as a nation as the government. 36.6% is a horrible number for the party currently controlling the government. But those are bad numbers only in the context of 'how we do things in Canada': in Germany in 2009, the CDU/CSU had a 'decisive' victory with only 33.8% of the vote, in Italy in 2008 Berlusconi comfortably won with 37.4%. Our closest parliamentary role model, the UK, just saw the Conservatives take power with 36.1%. This is how democracy works in modern western countries. Multipartisanism is the norm.

Within the Canadian context at the moment, the word 'coalition' is always assumed to mean a Liberal/NDP coalition. The is mostly based around the adversarial character of the Conservative Party at the moment: both that it suits their purposes to frighten people about the spectre of a 'coalition of losers' (perhaps with the BQ tossed in) and also that it's quite impossible to imagine the conservatives entering into a genuine power-sharing agreement with any of its opponents.

But that will have to change sooner or later. Harper is right when he says a coalition of parties that excludes the single party that earned the most votes lacks legitimacy. Globally there is increasingly a sense that in multipartisan democracies, the single party that gets the largest share of votes and/or seats has the right to attempt to form a viable coalition. For the sake of the maturity of our political system, I would welcome the idea of the Conservatives entering into formal coalition talks after the next election, provided they got the most votes.

A majority of Canadians, EKOS tells us, want a return to majority government. That might be all but impossible; what we need is to turn away from unstable minority governments. The unchecked power to follow an agenda as far as possible is a risk we might in the long-term be happy to avoid. But operating under the constant threat of, and the well-honed dread of, elections has caused out entire political system to coalesce around opinion polls. Never before have Ipsos, Angus Reid, EKOS and Nanos wielded so much power. Canada needs to enter into a discussion about how to learn to accept the idea of coalition.

On the other hand, though, at present the Conservatives would seemingly be unable to put together a stable coalition with any other party. What then? I suspect that the 2008 attempt by the Liberals, the NDP and the BQ to form a coaltion was so poorly recieved because it seemed undemocratic. Perhaps it was: but if the first party proves unable to put together a stable parliamentary majority, it should fall to other parties to attempt to do so. This would, I think, be the beginnings of a modern political system, one where a multitude of voices does not come at the price of an increase in instability, and one, hopefully, that can get over the destructive adversarial nature of Canadian politics at the moment.

New Brunswick and Disproportionality

Lately I've become interested in 'disproportionality', the extent to which a general election can produce a seat count in the House whose percentages differ from the percentages of the popular vote that produced them. If in an election, 48% of voters voted for Party A, 39% voted for Party B and 13% voted for Party C, and if that wound up with a House of Commons where 52% of the seats were filled with Party A members, 40% of the seats were Party B and the remaining 8% were party C, what would generally be considered relatively proportionate. By and large, there would be little dispute about whether the makeup of the House reflected the voting intentions of the people.

In fact, though, such proportionality is rare, particularly in Canada with its First-Past-the-Post and multiparty systems. Calls for abolition of FPTP (or 'winner-takes-all') election systems are strongest in multiparty systems; in bipartisan political systems, the effect is more minimal.

Canada is an interesting country, in that at the federal level and across each province, a number of parties vie for office. Federally, for example, we currently have five that can be called 'major'. Yet ultimately, federally and in most provinces it ultimately comes down to two parties with a realistic chance of governing and a group of others with, at best, a chance of holding sway in minority governments. The Atlantic provinces are an interesting case in point, ranging from PEI, the most truly bipartisan part of Canada, to Nova Scotia, which is perhaps the only legitimately multipartisan area of Canada at the moment. Somewhere in the middle lies New Brunswick.

For most of New Brunswick's history, it's been genuinely bipartisan: in recent years the NDP has at best been able to get one seat - the leader's - in the Legislative Assembly. Apart from that, and with one major exception (which I'll get to), the trend has been that in a provincial election the Progressive Conservatives and the Liberals will combine for about 90% of the vote. In other words, the vast majority of people in New Brunswick see their elections on a strictly binary basis.

When this is the case, disproportionality changes in importance: when one party squeaks above fifty percent, disproportionality either doesn't really matter (is there a real difference between, say, 60% of the legislature or 70%?) or is of terrible importance (if the elections return a simple majority of votes for Party A but a simple majority of seats for Part B). While looking blandly bipartisan on the surface, New Brunswick actually has had quite an interesting electoral history:

• In both 1970 and 1974, the Progressive Conservatives got parliamentary majorities despite getting fewer votes than the Liberals, making fully eight years of majority government of questionable legitimacy.
• In 1987, a landslide 60.4% of the vote (compared to 28.6% for the PCs and 10.6% for the NDP) returned every single seat in the Assembly to the Liberal Party, leading to four years of unopposed government.
• The very next election in 1991 led to what appeared to be a complete restructuring of the electoral scene, as the Liberals got a second majority, but the upstart Confederation of Regions Party got eight seats, 21.2% of the vote and the status of Official Opposition, and both the PCs and the NDP has representation in a four-part parliament. Yet by the next election, the Liberals and the PCs were back to a combined vote of 82.5%.

One of the major talking points this time around was a return to multipartisanship. Theoretically, a rejuvenated NDP would become a major electoral presence, while the Green Party and the upstart People's Alliance would also be on hand to contest. At the outset of the campaign, it appeared that anything could happen. And the results? Well, that's a bit more difficult to gauge. A combined total of 16.7% of the vote for the three parties and independents looks like a victory for multipartisanship. And in fact it is - especially when the non-Liberal/PC numbers for the last election were 5.3%. Yet that 16.7% translated to no seats whatsoever - and New Brunswick is left again with a bipartisan Assembly, with only the PCs forming the government and only the Liberals in opposition.

I've become interested in the Gallagher Index, a tool to measure disproportionality. It gives a particular number, based on some fancy math resulting from the difference between percent of popular vote and percent of seats in the Legislative Assembly for each party.

I calculated it last night based on the numbers then posted on the CBC's website. It seems they have shifted a little bit, but at the moment I don't feel like recalculating the numbers. In any case:

• The PCs got 48.92% of the vote and 76.36% of the seats, a difference of 27.44 points.
• The Liberals got 34.45% of the vote and 23.64% of the seats, a difference of -10.81 points.
• The NDP got 10.29% of the vote and no seats, a difference of -10.29 points.
• The Greens got 4.54% of the vote and no seats, a difference of -4.54 points.
• The People's Alliance got 1.18% of the vote and no seats, a difference of -1.18 points.
• Independents got 0.62% of the vote and no seats, a difference of -0.62 points.

A little bit of number crunching gets, based on those mostly-accurate CBC numbers, a Gallagher Index of 22.34, which is remarkably high. Over the coming days I want to look at the Gallagher Index a bit more and compare results across provinces and across eras. At the moment, though, I'll finish up by calling attention to the fact that while the PCs did get a grossly overinflated percentage of seats, by and large it's tough to see the legitimacy being questioned: 48.92% (or 48.87% at the moment) is more than 14% above the Liberals and a hair's-breadth from being a simple majority. The lack of minor-party representation is problematic, and the Liberals' underperformance in number of seats cause for concern, but David Alward's mandate is not. He won the election, fair and square, and the parliamentary makeup shows that.

Canada: We're number two, but we try harder

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EKOS has released their weekly poll on the Canadian political landscape. This one includes two different indicators, both of which serve as kinda-good-news for the NDP. One is the non-news that Jack Layton gets better personal ratings than either Stephen Harper or Michael Ignatieff (I think Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might poll better than those two lately). The other, and for our present interests more noteworthy, item regards voters' 'second choice'. In other words, if for some reason they were unable or decided not to vote for their main party, who would they vote for instead?

In this category, the NDP do incredible. Their total 'second choice' numbers are 17.4%, which puts them in a virtual tie for first with the Liberals, at 17.5% ('no second choice' leads in almost every category I'm about to consider, so I'll not discuss it). The Conservatives rank below even Green for second choice - a sign of how polarised opinions of the CPC are, and also a sign of how fluid support among the traffic-jam of left-of-centre parties could potentially be. Anyway, let's see how the NDP do stat-by-stat.

They're preference #2 (behind the Liberals) for Tory supporters and Green supporters, and preference #1, by large margins, for Liberal and BQ supporters. Oddly, they rank low among supporters of 'other' parties.

They're the most popular second choice in Québec as a whole, preference #2 behind the Liberals in BC, Sask/Man (considered together in EKOS polls for some reason), Ontario and Atlantic Canada, and #3 behind a Liberal-Green tie in Alberta.

They're second-choice preference #2 for men nationwide, behind the Liberals, but #1 for women nationwide. They're behind the Liberals in the <25 and 25-44 age groups, but #1 in 45-64 and 65+ age groups. They're #1 for university graduates and 'high school or less', but tie Green for #2 in college grads.

Impressive stats, all-round. Except, of course, that EKOS is polling which party people don't plan to vote for. It's a bit of an always-the-bridesmaid thing, really. It shows that the NDP are well-liked, especially outside of the Conservative base, but not necessarily trusted to cast a vote for (this seems especially true in Québec, where the NDP's stock have at times been so low that they do not even have a provincial party, uniquely so among party-based legislatures in Canada). It's tough to know how much tactical voting enters into an opinion poll, but you might say that there are people presently telling EKOS they plan to vote for the Liberals or, arguably, the BQ as opposed to the NDP merely in order to keep the Tories out (in Quebec, possibly to keep each other out too). But I get the feeling that that's not really all that high a percentage. I think that 17.4% of the electorate 'like the NDP, but like another party better'. And in that context, it's not all that great news. It suggests that the NDP would stand to gain votes primarily through some large-scale shattering of confidence in the LPC or the BQ.

One thing that is interesting, though, is that this poll suggests that perhaps the NDP should reconsider which alternative to First Past the Post to support. As far as I know, the NDP by and large supports Proportional Representation - something that, at the moment, would afford them approximately 17.6% of seats in the House of Commons (yes, that's correct: the second-choice numbers for the NDP almost exactly equal their first-choice numbers). Perhaps they'd do best to consider a Preferential Ballot, where, confronted with a list of candidates, people enumerate them in order of their preference, '1' being their principal vote and '2' being the candidate to whom that vote is transferred if vote #1 was cast for a losing candidate. In this system, we can see that some 35% of the electorate would write either a '1' or a '2' next to the NDP.

But so what? Well, the poll shows that roughly as many NDPers choose Liberal second as vice versa, and as many NDPers choose Green as vice versa. This is also true for NDPers and Conservatives, mind you, but to a lesser degree. I think that, by and large, what we'd find in a Preferential Ballot system, is that in ridings where the NDP polled third or lower, the NDP vote would be broken up, largely in favour of the Liberals, in many cases pushing the Liberals ahead of the Conservatives. In ridings, though, where the NDP polled above the Liberals in second place, most of the Liberal vote wold be distributed to the NDP, in many cases pushing them above the Conservatives. What we might find, in this case, is a large number of ridings with a nominal Conservative plurality (the most votes but less than 50% of the vote) changing hands in a Preferential Ballot arrangement to either the NDP or the Liberals - in Québec, perhaps also to the BQ. Emboldened Green supporters in some ridings might push Green to second overall in some ridings (Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, for example, or Central Nova, or some ridings in BC or Alberta), which could then, upon redistribution of the Liberal and NDP votes, push them above the Conservatives, producing a parliament with Greens in it.

In any case, in a Preferential Ballot system, the Conservatives - 44% of whose electorate say they would vote for no-one else - would be the losers. Yes, they get double-digit second-choice support from each party, but that still remains substantially less than the second-choice support the other four parties enjoy from each other. The famous image from the leaders' debates in 2008 of four party leaders sat next to each other, all directly confronting Stephen Harper on the other side of the table is grounded in reality, and is a feature of the Canadian landscape that on the one hand registers great animosity towards the Conservatives but on the other hand, under FPTP, returns more Conservatives to parliament than any other party.

Which is a reality that all the good news Jack Layton gets in this EKOS poll won't change.

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